From the Fandango and the Mashed Potato to the Roger Rabbit and the Cabbage Patch, dances always get lost to the fickle and fashionable sands of time. While Alfonso Robero infomercials and Thriller videos defined dancefloor moves for the 1980s, 90s kids ground on glowsticks and made "energy balls" while flopping about in size 50 Dickies. Which is to say that what's considered danceable now was not necessarily so scant years back.
While wallflowering remains the dance of choice for New York's cooler-than cognoscenti, there seems to be a bit more fidgeting out in San Francisco. Gal quartet Erase Errata are often mentioned in the same breath as easily-clumped "dancepunk" acts like The Rapture, Liars, and !!!, and for good reason: wiry, spastic, and elastic around their stripped-down culminations of the last twenty years of underground punk and all its permutations, Erase Errata is, at their very core, exuberant. Even a recent set of remixes by Kid606, Matmos, Adult., and Kevin Blechdom failed to significantly alter the group's sound or make it any more danceable. The same goes for the band itself, though, as the follow-up to 2001's Other Animals, At Crystal Palace, simply keeps the course.
"Driving Test" is the best commuter-meditation-as-portrait-of-suffering-humanity since Nilsson's "Driving Along", as singer Jenny Hoyston watches the spectrum of faces blur past. The rest of Erase Errata revs and taps the brakes before settling into a jaunty, stripped-clean groove buoyed by bassist Ellie Erickson and the piston-clicking precision of drummer Bianca Sparta, whose rhythms come and go for scant instants at best before skittering apart and re-forming. For the most part, the sonic surprises are scattered to the corners of songs-- there are little touches here and there: like the trembling trumpet that tremors along with the guitar at the end of "Ca. Viewing", taps of piano, or the tape reversal on the second half of the bounding but otherwise too-brief "Surprize It's Easter".
For the opening moments of the almost anthemic "Let's Be Active c/o Club Hott", Sara Jaffe's spiky guitar leads are strident and irregularly melodic. The brain-scratching strings that bob with the eye-thudding bass and clamming hi-hat of "Owls", jerk with a tempered ferocity that frees up sharp elbows and wobbly knees for the most spastic of dances. Simple rebounding pull-offs set the rollicking base for "Retreat! The Most Familiar", which remains the most tightly wound and effective rock number of the set. Were it not already a Kid606 remix, it would cry out for the treatment.
The past, for the most part, is evoked, but the album escapes being too heavily indebted to it. There's plenty of Minutemen twitch, Dog Faced Herman tick, Bikini Kill bossiness, and a cleverly wrapped polemic that even recalls the Desperate Bicycles' delicious DIY rhetoric. While sophomore efforts can fall either to heightened expectations, shorter gestation period, or overreaching goals, the girls have instead kept the machine largely intact and untinkered with, even stripping it all down to a lean twenty-seven minutes. At a future point, the jitters Erase Errata elicit on the dancefloor may be recalled merely as some generation's cringe-worthy fad, but with their grasp of time's out-bursted brevity, they have their moves down pat for the moment.
